


Ani

by jmtorres



Category: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Genre: F/M, M/M, psychic dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-08-05
Updated: 2002-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:36:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anakin curls up in Obi-Wan's bed to banish dreams of what happens to his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ani

_Oh, Annie, I will love you  
Annie, won't you come home today  
Oh, Annie, I will need you  
Annie, won't you come home to stay  
Oh, Annie's run away..._

~"Annie," Entrain.

Anakin only had the dream when he slept alone.

As a boy who had lived in poverty and slavery, he had shared a pallet with his mother long after she'd stopped nursing him, simply because there was no where else to sleep. In the first eight years of his life, Anakin never had the dream.

Perhaps he would not have been as eager to leave Tatooine with the two Jedi, if he had.

As Obi-wan's padawan learner, things were different. Obi-wan would come sit by his bed when his sleeping cries carried, and stroke his forehead until he woke, but he always left when Anakin was calm again. Anakin saw the circles under Obi-wan's eyes, and learned to make himself silent in his sleep.

It was not such a difficult thing. If you concentrated in the right way before you went to sleep, as you were falling asleep, then it would hold while you slept.

The dream got worse.

When Anakin was nine, he woke in the middle of the night, and went to Obi-wan's chamber, and crawled into his bed. Obi-wan woke and asked him, "Anakin, what are you doing here?"

"I've been dreaming, master," Anakin replied. "But I've only had the dreams I've slept alone. I thought--maybe--"

Obi-wan's face, shadowed, looked so sad and so weary that Anakin wondered if he shouldn't have come here. "Sleep in your own bed, Anakin. Tomorrow we'll add some dreamwork to your curriculum. You can learn to manage the dreams on your own."

"It's not fair!" Anakin burst out. "You slept with Master Qui-gon!"

Obi-wan gazed at him silently, painfully.

"Or--was that--" Anakin faltered. "Only because there wasn't... room on the ship."

"No," Obi-wan replied. "But I was--" And here he seemed to weigh his words. "Older than you are, when I made the choice to share my master's bed."

Anakin wrinkled his nose at him. "You mean _sex?_" he asked, disgustedly. "I wasn't asking you for _that._"

"I... see," Obi-wan said, looking startled. "I hardly meant to imply that you were, only that it might not be appropriate for you to--for us to--"

"Please," said Anakin, "can I just _sleep_ here?"

"Very well," Obi-wan said. And then, as if to show that he wasn't just tolerating Anakin, but welcoming him, he put his arms around the boy. Anakin slept with his face pressed to Obi-wan's chest, and without dreaming.

Obi-wan did not permit Anakin this indulgence often, but he never entirely put a stop to it either. The dreams, he would say, getting the last word in over his dead master, would not be happening to Anakin if Anakin had been taken to become a Jedi in infancy, as should have been done--but of course, it could not have been done, and there was nothing to do for it now but try to ease them.

Obi-wan made Anakin talk about the dream, saying that it might be a vision. It was difficult, because Anakin couldn't remember any details. There was his mother, and she was frightened, and there were formless, hooded shapes taking her, hands grabbing, and the noises they made were not words, so Anakin never knew why they were taking her. Obi-wan once, hesitantly, asked if Anakin was sure that it was his mother they were taking.

"Who else would it be?" Anakin asked, derisively. "I can see her face."

"Are they taking her from you, or... are they taking you from her?" Obi-wan asked.

Anakin realized with a start what Obi-wan was asking. "You think--the hoods--"

"The description did put me in mind of a Jedi's robes, yes," Obi-wan admitted. "Anakin, I think you need to ask yourself: do you _want_ to be here? Do you want to be my apprentice? Do you want to want to be a Jedi?"

"Yes!" Anakin protested.

"Think on it," Obi-wan advised.

Obi-wan taught him techniques for taking control of a dream, but Anakin couldn't make them work, because as far as he could tell he wasn't _in_ the dream. It was like being shown a hologram of something happening so far away--another planet, another galaxy, past the Outer Rim and gone--that there was no chance of reaching it before the dream was over.

And in the meantime, sometimes, Anakin slept in Obi-wan's bed.

Obi-wan started sleeping in his leggings and tunic around the time Anakin started growing hair on places other than his head. That was when Anakin realized that Obi-wan still wasn't comfortable with Anakin's midnight visits, even though he allowed them. Anakin started practicing something else: if you concentrated in the right way before you went to sleep, as you were falling asleep, then _you could stop yourself from dreaming._

It didn't always work. If Anakin was too exhausted to concentrate when he went to bed, or if he was distracted by their current circumstances, their current mission, then he couldn't stop himself from dreaming. But he managed to keep himself from having _the_ dream for years.

But when he had the dream again, when he was eighteen, it was worse. It was the worst it had ever been. His mother wasn't just frightened, she was in pain, and Anakin could feel the pain, in his face, in his hands, in the sockets of his shoulders, in his hips and knees and shins. The hooded figures where everywhere and their noises were shrieks and their cloaks were suffocating and their hands clawed at her hair.

Anakin couldn't, wouldn't admit to Obi-wan that the dream was back, after he'd spent so long conquering it. So he did something else to get back into the safety of Obi-wan's bed: he asked Obi-wan to have sex with him.

"And here I thought you were lusting after that padawan with the tail. Rhiannon, isn't it?" Obi-wan joked.

"I'm not lusting after her, or anyone else, for that matter," Anakin replied. "Lust is an uncontrolled emotion."

"Hmm," said Obi-wan. "No lust for me, then?"

"Well," Anakin hedged, hoping Obi-wan wouldn't decide denying him was the best way to limit the errant emotion he was about to admit to, "maybe a little."

Anakin knew a lot about sex in theory, but hardly at all in practice, and knew he would be an inept seducer at best. He convinced Obi-wan to take the active role, to allow himself to be passive, with pleas to "Teach me," "Show me," and, finally, daringly, "Fuck me."

"Language, padawan," Obi-wan said breathlessly, but obliged.

And then the unthinkable happened. Warm and safe in Obi-wan's arms, Anakin had the dream.

Now there wasn't just fear and pain. Now there was violation. Anakin knew it was because he'd had sex with Obi-wan; there was no other reason that the dream should change that way immediately after. This was the proof that it was a common nightmare and not a Jedi's vision--it changed in response to his own experiences.

"Anakin?" Obi-wan asked, stroking his temple.

Anakin couldn't figure out a way to deny it. He was forced to confess to Obi-wan, "I dreamt of her again. My mother."

"And all these years that you slept on your own--you didn't have the dream?" Obi-wan asked.

"No, not once," Anakin insisted, leaving out both the previous night and the effort he'd put into suppressing the dream. "It's different now," he added.

"How so?" Obi-wan asked.

"She's--they--they're hurting her," Anakin said. "The hooded figures."

"Anakin," Obi-wan murmured, and somehow, without Anakin ever uttering the word "rape," understood what he was thinking in his own miserable brain. "Tell me. Did you ever reach any certainty on--who the hooded figures are?"

"No," Anakin whispered. "But it's about my mother. It's not me. You're not--you didn't--hurt me."

"Still," said Obi-wan, "perhaps we should sleep apart tomorrow, and see if you have the dream again, or if it now manifests only when you do sleep with me."

To protest would be to admit that he had had the dream the night before and not confided in Obi-wan, so Anakin remained silent.

And then, for a month, he had the dream. Each night, whether alone or with Obi-wan, whether they had sex or not, he dreamed of his mother's violation at the hands of hooded, screaming, faceless villains. No amount of concentration could wrap the Force around him sufficiently to ward it off, or even to keep his own cries in his throat.

The first night it went away, he dreamed of Padme. Senator Amidala, but he called her Padme and she called him Ani, and it was like they were young again. She lay in the bunk above his on the refugee transport they were taking back to Naboo, and whether or not she knew he dreamed of her, she certainly knew he was attracted to her.

Anakin thought that perhaps he had finally found an antidote to the dream. On Naboo, he thought of her before he went to sleep: in the tight, black leather that stopped under her shoulders--that was his favorite of all the outfits she had worn so far.

He had the dream that night, and this time Padme did know. She said, when she spoke to him in the morning, that she had heard his nightmares.

And Anakin replied that he had to go to his mother. He still didn't believe there was any prescient quality to the dream, but it was the only thing he could think of to banish it, to see his mother whole and well.

Padme came with him to Tatooine, but Anakin left her behind when he went after the Tuscan raiders who had taken his mother. By this point, whether or not he accepted his mother's husband's belief of her death, he knew he would not find her whole and well. And if he had had the dream his whole life spent apart from her, it had only become so violent, so real, in the last month: the exact amount of time since she had been taken.

Hooded? Masked? Or simply alien? The shrieks in his head matched the honking of a Tuscan. If that much of the dream was true--

Why would a Tuscan keep a human woman tied to a cross in his hut for a month? Anakin knew the answer to that, and it filled him with horror and terrible anger. He held his mother in his arms as she died and the cut across her face, her bound wrists, the bruises on her body, were the pain he had felt every night and woken with every morning.

Anakin killed them all. Every last one of them. For taking his mother, for hurting her, for raping her, and the rest for not having the compassion to free her. He carried her limp body, wrapped in grey mourning cloth, back to the moisture farm, and prayed that when they buried her, they were laying to rest not only her body, but his dreams.

If only, if only. If only he had heeded the dream earlier, had run to his mother's rescue weeks ago. It was his fault for not listening. It was his fault his mother was dead.

The night Anakin and Amidala consummated their marriage, he had the dream again. It had changed. It was worse. For once, Anakin was in the dream himself.

He was a hooded figure, shrieking, with a clawed hand and a horrible rage. He savaged the other figures around him, but, in his fury, he tore apart his mother as well. He held his battered body to him and she said, "Ani, oh, Ani, now I am complete," a grimace across her face, and he cried out, "No, don't say that, don't you dare say that, how can say that after I hurt you--"

Anakin left in the morning without waking his wife, whose dark hair lay loose and not as long as he might have expected on the pillow, and who reminded him far too much of things he wanted to forget. He ran home to Coruscant, to Obi-wan, to a life with yet another lie.

Obi-wan couldn't quell the dream anymore. But it was almost enough that he once had.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also archived at dreamwidth: http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/1050510.html


End file.
